


Who Needs a Soulmate when You've got a Blue-Eyes White Dragon

by Eastern_Eden



Series: Why fight when we could be friends instead [1]
Category: Yu-Gi-Oh!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Before Battle City, Fluff, M/M, One Shot, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, after Duelist Kingdom, boys being dumb
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-07
Updated: 2018-05-07
Packaged: 2019-05-03 18:14:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14574738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eastern_Eden/pseuds/Eastern_Eden
Summary: Seto's skin is blank. Until it isn't.-Just another soulmate AU where the thoughts of your soulmate constantly appear on somewhere on your body.





	Who Needs a Soulmate when You've got a Blue-Eyes White Dragon

**Author's Note:**

> This started out as stress relief and turned into tooth-rotting fluff. Oops.

If he could choose his own soulmate, it would probably be the Blue-Eyes White Dragon. It was perfect; it didn't talk, and would never,  _could_  never bother him. Never mind the fact that it was a  _dragon._ Or, you know, a Duel Monsters card. 

It would just be less of a hassle.

It would have been easier if his neck had just remained blank like it had for most of his life, Kaiba Seto thought to himself with uncomfortable irritation. In a world where your supposed other half’s thoughts inscribed themselves somewhere on your own body, Seto had almost thought that he didn’t have a soulmate. He’d even asked Mokuba to check him over to make sure that the words weren’t writing themselves somewhere Seto couldn’t see them when the two of them were younger, but they just weren’t there. 

He’d had silence on his skin for almost sixteen years. Not even a stray thought. Seto had learned the hard way not to ask about it during his childhood; Gozaburo had laughed, showed Seto his own blank skin, and told him that it meant that he would end up a winner, just like him. Somehow, that wasn’t very comforting. 

Honestly, despite his hatred of his adopted father, Seto probably would have preferred it that way. Soulmates were a waste of time as far as Seto was concerned, especially to someone in his position. All he needed was Mokuba, safe and out of harms way, to be happy. And to finally defeat Mutou Yuugi, of course. The blank, pale expanses of his body had become the norm, but after the nightmare that had been Duelist Kingdom, he’d woken up to Pegasus’ defeat at the hands of his rival and strings of incoherent thoughts around his neck.

Besides, what use were soul thoughts that he couldn’t even read without the aid of a mirror? It was as if his own body was telling him that the words weren’t even meant for Seto to read them, yet they chained him to this mystery person. He didn’t like it; it left him feeling vulnerable and uneasy, like having a part of himself on display that he couldn’t control. 

Mokuba had looked at him sideways when Seto had thrown out all of his open collar shirts and exchanged them for high collar coats and turtlenecks, but hadn’t said a word.

Good. Seto never liked having to explain himself. 

Thankfully, his school uniform covered up his neck well enough if he buttoned it all the way up. Though in the summer heat that was beginning to be a problem. 

Seto was just finishing placing his laptop and the rest of his notes carefully back into his briefcase as the rest of the class noisily packed up around him, when he heard a commotion from the back of the room. Seto glared a little harder at the floor. Couldn’t those idiots just leave quietly like everyone else? 

Obviously not, he sneered to himself, as Jonouchi’s loud complaining pierced through the din.

“All I’m sayin’,” Jonouchi said, gesticulating wildly, “is that whoever this asshole is they could have easier to read thoughts!”

Mutou winced. “Jonouchi-kun,” he said. “I’m sure thats not your soulmates fault…”

So the mutt had a soulmate, did he? Seto hadn’t heard him talk about it before, so it must have happened pretty recently.

“Yeah, yeah, Yuugi, but I just wish I could read the damn thing. Why do they need to use so many fancy kanji all the time? I can barely decipher half of what they’re saying,” Jonouchi said, scowling.

Seto smirked. It wasn’t any of his business, but it might as well have been with they way Jonouchi was shouting, so he didn’t feel guilty in the least for adding his own two cents. “Decipher?” Seto said derisively, rising from his desk. “I’ll admit, Jonouchi, I didn’t think that caliber of word was in your vocabulary.”

Masaki and Honda rolled their eyes, while Mutou just sighed. What? It wasn’t like he did this all the time! It was just that Jonouchi said a lot of stupid things! How was Seto supposed to ignore them?

Jonouchi, it seemed, shared none of the exasperation of his friends. As expected, he rose to take the bait. “What’s that supposed to mean, Kaiba? I’m not a fuckin’ moron, no matter what you may think!” Jonouchi growled.

“Oh yes, that explains why you consistently get the lowest grades in our year,” Seto said, picking up his briefcase. He looked to where Jonouchi was covering his left wrist, the tiniest hint of red soul ink peeking out from his clenched fingers. “I’d be that whoever you’ve been saddled with has a better vocabulary, and you’ve been mooching off of the thoughts of someone much smarter.” 

“Fuck you!” Jonouchi raged, and Mutou tugged on the sleeve of his jacket worriedly. Seto wondered sometimes whether Mutou was just faking the innocent little boy routine. After all, when he dueled it was like facing a different person. He had to be pretending to be that much of a goody-two-shoes. (Not that Seto had any room to talk, being the teachers favorite. Money did wonders, he found, as did having an actual brain.)

“Kaiba-kun, Jonouchi-kun, please, lets just all be friendly. I just want everyone to get along,” Mutou said, looking between Seto and Jonouchi with pleading eyes and wringing his small hands. 

Maybe not. 

Seto scoffed. “I don’t know what gave you the idea that I’d ever be friendly with you, Yuugi, not to mention that moron,” he said, eyes flicking to Jonouchi before returning to Mutou’s shorter form. “But I have much better things to do than hang around here with your sorry bunch,” Seto said. He made a show of checking the watch on his wrist, though he didn’t actually care about the meeting he was probably running late for. The project that the Board had been working on was just about finished, and Seto was not looking forward to dealing with the bunch of goons that had already tried to oust him when he had been in a coma months earlier. Even if it _was_ a VR Duel Monsters game.

It had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the Blue-Eyes White Dragon was in the game. Seto only wanted to make sure that they programmed Blue-Eyes correctly, alright? 

Seto couldn’t resist a parting shot on his way out the door though. “If you can’t read your soulmate’s handwriting, I can only imagine that whoever has _your_ thoughts will never be able to read that level of gibberish,” Seto said, thinking absently about the unreadable, fragmented mess of red writing that encircled his own neck.

Jonouchi clutched at his wrist with white fingers. “Yeah? I bet you don’t even _have_ a soulmate, Kaiba, being a soulless bastard yourself!” He spat. His friends tittered nervously.

Seto’s hand reflexively flew to the collar of his jacket before he could stop it, and Jonouchi’s eyes narrowed as he tracked the movement. After his run in with Mutou’s “punishment game,” Seto had found himself unable to control his own reactions as well as he had before that whole fiasco. It left him feeling uncertain at the best of times and disgustingly vulnerable at the worst of them. At a loss for words, Seto settled for glaring at Jonouchi with as much venom as he could muster.

Jonouchi flinched, but there was a look on his face that Seto couldn’t quite place, while the rest of his friends exchanged puzzled glances.

Out of nowhere, another student ran past Seto back into the classroom, bumping the briefcase out of his hands and spilling the notes from the last class out onto the floor. They spread out in a flurry across the room and Seto whirled around to glare and the unfortunate soul who couldn’t look where the hell he was going. “You’d better hope that nothing is broken,” Seto snarled, the other student cowering and apologizing. 

Seto sighed, stooping down to gather the papers back up and check on his laptop. There appeared to be no damage done, luckily for that idiot. If there had been a single scratch…there would have been hell to pay. Seto worked quickly, rattled as he felt Mutou’s friends watching him, but trying his best not to show his discomfort.

He was Kaiba Seto. A silly question about soulmates wasn’t going to affect him that easily. 

Probably.

The papers on the floor were snatched up and placed carefully back into his briefcase, but as Seto was about to grab the last one, an essay that he had just gotten back, it was picked up carefully by Jonouchi. 

Jonouchi stared at it as if it had murdered his favorite pet. Seto coughed, hand outstretched, and Jonouchi startled. “Sorry,” he said, obviously insincere and vaguely horrified as he handed over the sheet. What the hell? Seto took it without a word and stuffed it in the briefcase with the others. Jonouchi gawked at him, and Seto gave him a look that could wilt flowers.

Seto backed out of the room without another word. The entire ordeal left him feeling unsettled and curious, despite himself. However, he was a busy man. Well, teenager. He had places to be! No time in his schedule for interacting with his childish rival and his dumb friends.

He could feel Jonouchi’s eyes on his back the entire way out.And if his strides were just a little bit faster than normal, well, nobody would dare call him out on it.

 

* * *

 

“If you don’t leave me alone in the next thirty seconds you better have a good reason for it,” Seto said, fingers tapping away rapidly on his laptop as he registered someone pulling up a chair to his desk.

The meeting yesterday with the Big Five had proven that the game was almost complete, but to Seto’s annoyance they were insisting that Seto had to test it himself to work through a couple of key bugs. Which sounded ridiculously shifty, of course, but Seto couldn’t really do much about it without outright accusing them of wrongdoing, which he had no actual evidence for, gut feelings notwithstanding. 

The presence to his left cleared his throat, and Seto’s frowned deepened. It was late, a couple of hours after school had ended, and usually Seto had time to himself to do his homework without anyone else entering the classroom because of club activities. It was the one time where he could focus on school work without mixing it with the business Seto had to take care as CEO of Kaiba Corp. 

Seto looked up, intending to ream out whoever it was out, and was taken by surprise when he met the curious gaze of Jonouchi. Seto stared at him as if Jonouchi had grown a second head, cursing himself for being rendered speechless twice in twenty-four hours.

What was he even doing here? Didn’t he leave with his little group of friends for where ever it was they spent their time? Burger World, or Mutou’s run down game shop, if he had to guess from the snippets of conversation he’d caught in the past.

As the silence stretched on, Jonouchi began to fidget, though he made no move to leave Seto the fuck alone, which was the only thing Seto wanted him to do. 

The prickle of words being etched into the skin on his neck caused Seto to rub at his collar, but he quickly brought his hand back down to his lap when he realized uneasily that Jonouchi was once again looking at his neck with an unidentifiable expression, not unlike the uncomfortable look that Jonouchi wore when a someone played a card in a duel that he had obviously never seen before. Seto eyed him with discomfort.

Was he just going to sit there and stare? Seto knew that Jonouchi was rude, but not usually _this_ rude.

“So, Kaiba, _do_ you have a soulmate?” Jonouchi asked, eyes not leaving Seto’s collar. Inexplicably, Seto felt the urge to check that the top button of his jacket was still secured, though he immediately felt silly for even thinking about it. 

Seto shifted awkwardly as he realized that he had let the question hang in the air, and cleared his throat. “Whats it to you? Obviously I’m a soulless bastard, so chances are, probably not,” he said, and Jonouchi winced.

“Uh…sorry about that,” Jonouchi said, reaching up to scratch awkwardly at the back of his blond head, and Seto caught a flash of red from Jonouchi’s left wrist. 

Seto glared at him suspiciously. “Why are you here so late,” He asked instead. “Don’t you usually leave with that group of morons to go terrorize the neighborhood?” Seto sneered.

“We don’t cause any trouble!” Jonouchi said, bristling. “I can be here if I want to. You don’t own the classroom!”

They lapsed back into an awkward silence. Seto slowly resumed typing, feeling a bit unsettled. He tried to regain his focus, thinking that Jonouchi was going to go now that he’d apologized to Seto for some asinine reason that he didn’t understand, but Jonouchi wasn’t budging. Seto glanced up from his typing and found Jonouchi squinting suspiciously at his wrist, where his soulmate’s words were inscribed. 

Try as he might, Seto couldn’t remember ever seeing Jonouchi have words on his arm during their duel at Duelist Kingdom or at any other time before that. It wasn’t unheard of for someone to get soul words later in life, (Seto had his own words to prove it), but Seto would have expected him to have gotten his way earlier. Plus, he would have guessed that someone like Jonouchi would have a soulmate as loud and obnoxious as he was, which wasn’t true based on the delicate looking red marks that circled his wrist. Seto kind of wanted to look at them closer; they looked familiar, in a strange way.

Seto sighed. Fine. If the mutt wanted to play, Seto would, just this once. “Thats new,” Seto said, tone conveying boredom.

He wasn’t interested. Not really. 

Jonouchi clamped his hand down around his wrist. “What’s it to you,” He said suspiciously.

Seto shrugged and resumed typing. The ball was in Jonouchi’s court now. The blond-haired boy narrowed his eyes, but slowly relaxed back into his chair. He really _was_ like a frightened animal sometimes. 

“I got it after Yuugi beat Pegasus at Duelist Kingdom,” Jonouchi admitted after a few moments of deliberating. 

Seto's fingers paused in their typing. Jonouchi looked at Seto cautiously out of the corner of his eyes when he thought Seto wouldn’t notice.

Seto had a sinking feeling deep in his gut.

“The thoughts are really fragmented,” Jonouchi went on, frustrated. “I can’t really tell what they say most of the time, but recently…” he trailed off, meeting Seto’s eyes with just a hint of steel below the surface of his brown gaze. He continued. “Recently, they’ve been mostly about Duel Monsters.”

Oh god.

“Why do you think I care about hearing this?” Seto asked as scathingly as he could, ice crawling up his spine as he considered Jonouchi carefully. “Wouldn’t your little rag-tag group, especially Mutou, be more interested in this than I could ever be?”

It wasn’t like Jonouchi talked to him often. In fact, the two rarely had conversations outside of arguing, insults, or Duel Monsters. Which was how Seto preferred it to be. Jonouchi was annoying, stupid, and a loudmouth, not to mention a terrible duelist. How had he even gotten to be runner up in Duelist Kingdom anyway? He’d lost, quite badly, to Seto before the championships, but still had managed to beat Bandit Keith.

Well, maybe that explained it. Bandit Keith was a washed up drunk these days. If Jonouchi Katsuya could beat him in a tournament, it just meant that Keith was worse than Seto had originally thought. 

Seto focused back on Jonouchi, who looked as though he was struggling to come up with an answer. Seto scowled. If he wasn’t going to say anything, why didn’t Jonouchi just _leave him alone_ already?

As if sensing Seto’s agitation, Jonouchi seemed to pull himself together. “Fine,” he said, suddenly nervous. “I tried to do this the easy way.”

Seto stared wide-eyedand uncomprehendingly as Jonouchi rolled up his left sleeve and shoved his wrist in Seto’s face. He suppressed a flinch.

“Go ahead, look at it,” Jonouchi said, completely ignoring that he was breaking social ettiquite by thrusting his goddamn _soul words_ out there for Seto to read. “Seem familiar?” Jonouchi added, as if it wasn’t weird to show someone you hate the most private part of your soul and expect them to _recognize it_. Except. 

Seto looked at the familiar red characters of his own perfect handwriting. No. No way.

“ ** _Fuck_** _,”_ Seto read from where it curled over Jonouchi’s wrist. 

From his _soulmate’s_ wrist.

Seto tried to keep his face impassive and his stare blank as he calmly met Jonouchi’s accusing eyes. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he lied through his teeth.

“ **This moron is my fucking soulmate** ,”Jonouchi’s wrist read, crimson and damning. They both stared down it it, Seto seething with betrayal and Jonouchi with a skeptical glance between his raised arm and Seto’s poor attempts at a poker face. 

“Yeah, okay Kaiba, I’d believe you if I couldn’t, you know, _read your thoughts on my arm!”_ Jonouchi said, another odd expression crossing his face.

Wait a minute. Was that bastard _laughing_ at him? He fucking was! Seto scowled, sinking into his chair.

Jonouchi was still looking at Seto as if he’d never seen him before. “…What.” Seto said, refusing to look at him. 

“Aren’t you going to show me mine?” Jonouchi said, gaining confidence. “What kind of thoughts do I have? Did you know it was me?” He grew embarrassed for a second. “I figured it out yesterday, from your essay. I wasn’t sure, because your thoughts are really hard to read and sometimes its just constant cursing and half the time it’s about the Blue-Eyes White Dragon, but I guess that makes sense because you kind of hate everyone and everything around you, Kaiba. Except maybe Mokuba, I guess,” Jonouchi said, rambling. “And Blue-Eyes, now that I think about it…”

Seto blinked at him incredulously. Dear lord, was this what he was stuck with now? 

Jonouchi opened his mouth to continue, but closed it with an audible click after catching sight of the new words carving themselves around his wrist. He flushed. 

Seto leaned forward to peer at it, curious about which thoughts chose to write themselves on his soulmate’s wrist and which ones stayed safely in his head. 

“ **Shut up, already,** ” Jonouchi’s wrist said. Seto was so surprised that he actually laughed, a softer sound, different then the manical cackling that he usually liked to partake in. 

Jonouchi jerked his head up to stare, but Seto found himself not really caring. He hadn’t laughed like this in a long, long time. Feeling generous, he reached up and began to undo his collar. He could at least give Jonouchi this. “I can’t read them,” Seto told him absently.

“What?” Jonouchi said.

“The soul words,” Seto said impatiently, working on the second button,

“Oh.”

The jacket came undone due to his quick fingers and Seto shed it, leaving him in his white undershirt. Jonouchi leaned forward curiously. Seto raised his chin, and Jonouchi caught sight of his own chicken scratch carving itself around Seto’s neck before his very eyes. He reached forward, as if to touch the words to make sure that they were real. 

Seto caught his hand in an iron grip, hand clasped over the spot where his own words were furiously scrawling across Jonouchi’s skin. “Don’t,” Seto said, glaring.

“Uh… Sorry,” Jonouchi said sheepishly, and Seto let his hand go. His palm felt warm where it had made contact with Jonouchi’s skin. Seto discreetly pressed his hands together, palm tingling. 

“What do they say?” Seto prompted.

Jonouchi colored further. “I can’t just…. _read them out_!” He protested. “Its embarrassing!” 

Seto gestured to his neck. “It’s not like I can read them myself,” he said. “And you get to read my thoughts, its only fair that you read me yours.” Seto smirked at Jonouchi. “Unless…you’re scared?”

Sure enough, Jonouchi bristled. “Fuck you, I’m not scared! Its just…weird to read out my own thoughts,” he finished awkwardly.

As if it wasn’t weird that they were even sitting here talking about this. Seto wanted to leave, but something in his chest told him that he should stick around for just a little longer. 

Despite his dislike of Jonouchi, Seto found himself not as upset about this whole situation as he thought that he would be. There were certainly worse people to have been saddled with. Like…Pegasus, or something. Ugh. That would be just horrifying. At least Jonouchi wasn’t a creep, and he could _duel_ , so he wasn’t completely boring. In fact, with a little bit of practice, Seto reasoned, Jonouchi could actually be quite good with a card like the Red-Eyes Black Dragon. If only he didn’t rely on such flaky gambling cards…

Jonouchi’s chair squealed as he pushed it back, and Seto frowned, realizing that he had been lost in his own thoughts. Jonouchi made a beeline for the far side of the room as Seto watched in confusion. 

What was he doing? Running away now, huh?

To Seto’s surprise, though, Jonouchi didn’t sit down in his own desk. He walked passedit and stopped at what Seto belatedly realized was Masaki Anzu’s desk, rummaging through her belongings before pulling out an object with a quiet noise of triumph. He made his way back to Seto’s desk and sat back down, holding out a small compact mirror. 

A mirror? Jonouchi coughed with embarrassment at Seto’s deadpan stare. “This way, you could read them yourself,” he said. It wasn’t a bad idea, actually. Quick thinking for someone that Seto didn’t usually think was that smart.

Seto plucked the compact out of Jonouchi’s hand and angled it until he could see his neck in the reflective surface. 

“ **…I knew it I knew it was him I knew it…** ” read Jonouchi’s thoughts. The words just repeated themselves in circles around his neck. Surprisingly simple. 

Now, for a test.

“Jonouchi,” Seto said.

“…yes?” Jonouchi responded hesitantly, still refusing to look at Seto.

“Do you honestly think you can beat me in a duel?” Seto asked, mostly to see Jonouchi’s reaction but also with a surprising hint of real curiosity as to what he would say. 

Jonouchi jerked back to face him indignantly. “What kinda question is that? Of course, Kaiba,” he boasted. “One of these days I’ll beat ya, I’ve gotten a lot better from practicing with Yuugi!”

Seto raised an eyebrow, turning to the mirror for confirmation.

“ **What a dick.** ”

Hey! Seto’s face scrunched up in irritation. Sure, he wasn’t the nicest guy around, but Seto didn’t like that his own skin was reminding him of this fact. He wasn’t _that_ bad. 

Okay, he might have deserved that one.

A snort from Seto’s unlikely companion caught his attention. Jonouchi tried to cover his laughs, but ended up guffawing at Seto’s disgruntled expression. 

“Look,” he said, laughing harder and holding out his wrist for Seto to read yet again. 

“ **Fuck off, Jonouchi.** ” It said with angry, red strokes.

Jonouchi grinned at him, and Seto was mystified. “I guess you really do find me annoying,” Jonouchi said, though it didn’t seem as though he was really that bothered by it.

In all honesty, Seto was surprised that Jonouchi was even sitting here talking to him about this in the first place. After all, Seto _did_ try to kill him and his friends during Death T, although ever since Yuugi’s punishment game Seto wasn’t really having any strange homicidal urges anymore. A strange, but not unwelcome change. Last time they had dueled Seto had ended up insulting him, as usual, not to mention wiping the floor with him. And, lets be honest here, Seto wasn’t a friendly guy. To anybody. Jonouchi would be perfectly justified in getting up and walking out on him. He just wasn’t soulmate material. Seto’s face fell.

What was he even doing? 

“Jonouchi,” Seto said bluntly, because he didn’t have _time_ for this anymore. “Why are you still here? What do you want from me?”

Jonouchi leaned back, regarding Seto carefully. “Well,” he began, “We don’t really know each other, do we Kaiba? I mean, sure, when I connected the dots I wasn’t so happy, but I figured hey, why not give it a shot? You might be a major dick—”

Seto scowled.

“—but you’re not completely unlikable,” Jonouchi continued, oblivious to Seto’s glower. “Yuugi’s always saying you’re not that bad, and that we should try and be friends, and we _are_ soulmates now…”

“I don’t need your pity, or your so-called friendship,” Seto began.

“I don’t pity you, dumbass,” Jonouchi said, exasperated. “Look,” he said, “I’m not saying that this is gonna work out. I just think that we should _try,_ ” He shrugged. “Maybe it won’t be half bad?” 

Seto thought about it. There wasn’t anything he could do to undo the situation, true. And Jonouchi did have a point. It couldn’t be any worse than having his soul stolen, or Mokuba getting kidnapped again, that much Seto was sure of.

“Plus,” Jonouchi added, a mischievous grin on his face that Seto just _knew_ he was going to learn to hate, “You could duel me sometime! You’re _good_ at that game, so maybe I could learn a thing or too while you kick my ass!” Jonouchi backpedaled a bit, clearing his throat. “I mean…while I totally beat you, Kaiba.”

“In your dreams, mutt,” Seto said, shaking his head. When would this guy realize that he was a million years too early to beat him in a game. Seto’s mouth twitched into a ghost of a smile, against his will.

Moron.

“Ghe—I ain’t a dog, Kaiba!”

Seto closed his laptop and slid it back into his briefcase. “I suppose not,” He said generously. He stood up, leaving Jonouchi confused and scrambling to his feet as well.

“Kaiba?” Jonouchi questioned, uncertainty and maybe a bit of insecurity written across his face. The guy was like an open book sometimes. The complete opposite of Seto, who always played his cards close to his chest.

He had two options. 

He could pretend that this never happened. Seto could walk out the door, leaving Jonouchi behind and there was nothing that the other boy could do about it. Seto was perfectly capable of pretending that this whole soulmate thing was just a bad dream. He could wear turtlenecks forever, if he had to. Nobody would ever know, and he could threaten Jonouchi to stay quiet. With a little cash, he’d probably let it go. Eventually. 

Or. 

Seto could try. The more he thought about it, the more he wanted to. Sure, this thing with Jonouchi wasn’t likely to work out. For goodness sake, this was the first conversation they’d had in months that wasn’t just insults back and forth! And there was the issue with Mutou. Seto wasn’t going to stop his own plans just because his rival was Jonouchi’s best friend. But maybe…

Seto cleared his throat. “The duel arenas at Kaiba Land were recently updated,” He said.

“What?” Jonouchi said, thrown.

“I need to do a few tests to see how they perform after the system reboot,” Seto said, more insistently. God, was Jonouchi really that stupid?

“Oh,” Jonouchi said, drooping a bit and obviously misunderstanding the unspoken question. The moron wasn’t going to get it if Seto kept trying subtlety.

“I can’t duel myself,” Seto finally muttered.

Jonouchi’s eyes widened, and he stood up a bit straighter. “Duel?” He asked, as if he couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. “You’d duel, with me?”

Seto sighed and walked over to the open doorway. He looked back over his shoulder. Jonouchi was still standing in the middle of the room, staring at Seto. Seto tapped his left wrist, right over where he knew his own handwriting curled around Jonouchi’s skin. 

Jonouchi raised his arm to his face to read the words that appeared. 

“ **Coming, moron?** ”

Jonouchi smiled, so bright it made Seto’s heart skip a beat, and then he followed Seto out the door.

Maybe it could work.


End file.
